Cape Town is considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world because it nestles in the mountains and the fynbos.
This intimate urban-nature relationship means that sometimes people meet the occupants of the natural world.
Sometimes we find this wonderful (think sunbirds visiting your garden) and sometimes not so wonderful (think baboons raiding your kitchen).
The Cape porcupine is a frequent visitor to gardens of houses perched on the urban edge and people have mixed feelings about these spiny rodents.
Some feel that they are pests (think of your favourite pot plant with nibbles out of it).
Others think that they are glorified pets (feeding them dinners of pumpkin and potatoes).
After years of research on these prickly portly creatures, I would like to share some titbits of information about them.
Many people are surprised to hear that porcupines are one of the few monogamous species – like humans, they like to mate for life (like humans they occasionally stray too).
They do not breed “like rats”, they have two to four babies per year, and invest heavily in their young.
A new-born porcupine is a small miracle – it is born with soft, rubbery quills (mothers will be glad to hear) and are incredibly precocious, stamping their feet when they want something or are cross or scared.
“Teenager” is the word that comes to mind.
The parents are quite protective of their babies. It’s quite sweet to see the family go out together in the evenings to look for food and see the parents form a thorny corral around the babies if they feel danger threatens.
What is not so sweet is how much a family of porcupines can dig up in your garden in one night.
Or how many pumpkins in a crop they can ruin by taking just one bite out of each one.
Many a disgruntled farmer has told me of the water pipes they chew and break, and the holes they make under fences.
Porcupines are not a threatened species; they are not listed as rare or endangered.
But this does not mean that they are not valuable.
My research in the Bokkeveld renosterveld (renosterveld is very similar to fynbos vegetation) showed that, in natural conditions, porcupines are a key driver of heterogeneity (diversity) in the landscape.
Think of porcupines as mini digging machines.
They make many little holes in the soil when digging for their favourite food – geophytes (plant species with a bulb or corm underground storage organ).
These little holes capture water and seeds, and change the texture and moisture of the soil in them and around them.
This creates space for new plants. These little holes also disrupt plant communities. These diggings are disturbances in the ecosystem, and, like any disturbance in any society, they create new patterns and shake things up. Things get stagnant if not shaken up once in a while!
I also discovered during my studies that porcupines are like gardeners. Some of the beautiful geophyte species that only occur in our fair land, benefit from porcupine disturbance, as they have little bulbils that spread and regenerate when a porcupine digs them up.
Their digging gives these rare species a chance to thrive in otherwise difficult conditions.
Porcupines are much like humans, messy creatures, wasteful but beautiful.
We are all part of the whole, so instead of vilifying them, or glorifying them, why don’t we learn to live with them. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but we are a super-innovative species.
Try fencing off your favourite plants, try deterrents, try to live with some loss. Porcupines are just big marshmallows covered in thorns. The reward of having these big sticky gardeners walking through our lives outshines the losses we incur.
